“Shut up and eat your blasted syllabub.”
With an impish smile, she did just that, with such blatant pleasure it was sheer torment to watch. Rafe gulped at his wine, but it failed to dull his desire. She seemed unaware of him, all of her senses engrossed in her sweet solitary pleasures. And he… Damn it, he was jealous! Of a blasted spoonful of blasted whipped cream!
The glass scraped empty, she dabbed at her lips with her serviette and smiled at him.
No, she didn’t simply smile. She cast her smile over him like a fisherman cast a net. It wrapped around him and made him long to draw near.
He stood so abruptly the table rocked. “I bid you good night.”
She leaped to her feet too. “Must you go so soon? We could…”
“What?”
“Um. Play billiards?”
“You don’t know how to play billiards.”
“If you please! I excel at the game,” she protested. “That is, I shall excel, once I learn how to play. I can teach myself, from a book, but it would be much more diverting to play with someone else.”
Rafe wavered. It would indeed be a pleasant way to pass the evening. He would enjoy teaching her, watching her frown of concentration, her triumphant joy when she sank a ball. Perhaps she would need guidance positioning her cue, and he would stand behind her, wrap his arms around her as he showed her how to find the angle. He would press his lips to the fragrant skin at her neck, perhaps nip at her ear so she would leap backward in surprise, and then run his hands up—
“Play with Sally and Martha,” he said.
“They’re staff.”
“I shouldn’t think you’d care about that.”
“I don’t. But those are the rules.” She nudged the empty plate in front of her. “Rules are so unspeakably silly, don’t you think? You know, when Pa made his first fortune, we moved to a nicer part of town, and I wasn’t allowed to see my old friends anymore. So I made new friends. Then Pa lost his fortune, and we moved again, and my new friends weren’t allowed to see me. I started again. Made new friends. And again Pa got rich, and again we moved, and so on. All these rules about who can be friends with whom and who can marry whom, when we’re all just people, aren’t we? But not you,” she added with a wan smile. “You’re not people.”
“Right.”
Rafe spoke automatically, seeing only her faltering smile, the way she straightened her shoulders as if bracing for more disappointment. He dragged his eyes off her, onto the empty plates between them, the debris of their fleeting domesticity. He didn’t want to be yet another person shutting a door in her face. True, his original plan was to ignore her, but that was an eon ago, back when she was nothing but a name.
“Never mind,” she said brightly. “I shall be quite content to read. How do you usually pass the time after dinner?”
“I read.”
“Then perhaps you might enjoy one of the books I collected today.” She gestured at a trio of books on the small table by the settees. “It makes no sense for you to sit over there reading, and for me to sit here reading. It’s a waste of…” She trailed off as she glanced at the empty fireplace.
In cooler weather, it would indeed be wasteful to sit in separate rooms with separate fires. In winter, if they sat together reading by the fire, would the light of the flames pick up the mix of colors in her hair? Would her ears and nose turn pink when she ran in the snow? She would throw snowballs at him, of course, and he would not hesitate to retaliate; he’d aim to hit her, to make her squeal and laugh and jump back up to throw snowballs at him again. Eventually he would run at her, tackle her, and they’d fall into the snow together…
“Have I said something amusing?” she said.
“Hmm?”
“You looked amused.”
“Hmm,” Rafe said, and fell into the empty settee.
Thea flew into a flurry of activity, carrying over their wine goblets, then dropping into the other settee and gathering the books.
“What would you like? First up, Leonora by Miss Edgeworth.” She flipped it open. “Oh. Some sentences are underlined.”
Rafe tensed and his heart skipped a beat. Blast. He should have foreseen this. Thea appeared not to notice, as she frowned at the page.
“That reminds me. Today I saw a strange marking in the…” She flicked a glance at him, then returned to the book. “Never mind. Let’s see what the previous reader underlined. ‘What a misfortune it is to be born a woman!’ Well, that’s cheerful. And maybe not for you.”
She tossed it aside and grabbed the next book.